We have learned to build organizations that connect thousands of people across continents. But have we given enough thought to what happens to human relationships as organizations grow?
A few weeks ago, I listened to a fascinating conversation with evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar on the Stanford Psychology Podcast. Dunbar is best known for what has become known as Dunbar's Number: the idea that humans can maintain approximately 150 meaningful social relationships.
At first glance, the concept seems to belong squarely in the realm of friendship. How many people can we truly know? How many relationships can we sustain before they become superficial? And why, despite having more ways to communicate than ever before, do we still struggle to maintain meaningful connections?
But the more I listened, the more I found myself thinking about work.
After all, many of us spend more waking hours with colleagues than with friends, neighbors, or even family members. Organizations have become one of the primary social environments of modern life. Yet when we think about organizational design, we tend to focus on strategy, structures, processes, governance, and efficiency. We discuss how to scale operations, coordinate teams, and accelerate decision-making, but rarely consider the human capacity for relationships as a constraint worth designing around.
And that made me wonder: What happens when we build organizations larger than the social worlds our brains evolved to navigate?
The Limits of Our Social World
What I found particularly interesting about Dunbar's research is that it is not simply about the number 150. It is about how human relationships are structured and the investment required to maintain them.
His social brain hypothesis suggests that our capacity to manage social relationships is influenced by both cognitive and time constraints. Our networks tend to organize themselves into concentric circles, with approximately 5 people in our closest circle, 15 close friends, 50 good friends, and a wider network of around 150 meaningful relationships. Beyond that are larger circles of acquaintances and familiar faces.
These numbers are NOT rigid boundaries, and the idea of a universal limit of 150 has been challenged by subsequent research. But the broader principle remains interesting: relationships require resources that are not infinitely available.
We have only so much time, attention, and emotional energy to invest in others. The closer the relationship, the more we generally invest in maintaining it. Familiarity develops through repeated interactions, while trust grows as we learn how people behave, respond to difficulties, and show up for one another.
Technology has transformed our ability to communicate, but it has not eliminated the effort involved in building relationships. We can reach hundreds of people in seconds, maintain professional networks spanning continents, and participate in communities of thousands. Yet having access to someone is not the same as knowing them, just as exchanging information is not the same as developing trust.
This distinction becomes particularly interesting when we look at the history of human communities.
Dunbar and other researchers have observed that certain traditional settlements and social groups have historically clustered around relatively small populations, often in the range of 100 to 200 individuals. There is considerable variation across societies, of course, but the recurrence of these group sizes suggests that there may be practical advantages to communities in which people can maintain some degree of personal familiarity.
In such environments, much of social life is coordinated through relationships. People know whom they can rely on, who contributes to the collective, and how others are likely to behave. Reputation, shared expectations, and mutual obligations help communities function without every interaction needing to be formally regulated.
This is not to romanticize village life. Small communities can be restrictive, hierarchical, and exclusionary, and personal familiarity does not guarantee fairness or harmony. But they illustrate something important: when people know one another, relationships themselves become a form of social infrastructure.
And perhaps that is something we have gradually lost sight of as organizations have grown.
When Relationships Stop Scaling
Over the last two centuries, we have created organizations of extraordinary size and complexity. Global enterprises now bring together thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of people across countries, cultures, and time zones. These structures have made remarkable achievements possible, from scientific breakthroughs to technological innovation and global cooperation.
Yet the social experience of belonging to an organization has changed considerably.
In a small company, people often understand how things work through direct experience. They know the individuals behind decisions, recognize how colleagues respond under pressure, and learn the culture by observing it in action. Much of what holds the organization together remains informal and largely unspoken.
As the organization grows, however, these mechanisms become increasingly difficult to sustain. Employees can no longer know everyone, leaders cannot maintain personal relationships with every team, and shared expectations can no longer spread exclusively through conversations and observation.
Organizations respond by introducing structures that make coordination possible at scale. Reporting lines clarify responsibilities, policies establish common standards, governance creates accountability, and communication systems help distribute information across increasingly complex networks.
These mechanisms are essential. Formal processes can protect people from arbitrary decisions, ensure consistency, and make organizations more transparent and equitable than systems based entirely on personal relationships.
AND I wonder whether we sometimes underestimate what these systems are also compensating for.
When people no longer know one another, trust must increasingly be supported by procedures. When reputation is no longer visible through everyday interactions, performance must be documented. When shared norms cannot spread naturally, values need to be articulated, communicated, and reinforced.
Culture, which once lived primarily through relationships and shared experiences, becomes something the organization must consciously describe and manage.
Perhaps this is why growing organizations often experience a subtle transformation that is difficult to capture in performance indicators. Communication becomes more demanding, alignment requires greater effort, and employees begin to feel less connected to the organization as a whole. Leaders may notice that the informal energy that once characterized the company is harder to preserve, even when the business is performing well.
We usually attribute these changes to complexity, and rightly so. But perhaps there is also a relational explanation.
As organizations grow, systems increasingly take on responsibilities that relationships once carried naturally.
This idea becomes even more interesting when we consider research by Dunbar and Emily Webber on communities of practice. Their work explores how professional communities can display layered social structures resembling those found in personal networks. Rather than suggesting that every organization should stop growing at 150 people, it raises the possibility that larger organizations may function more naturally when they preserve smaller, interconnected communities within the whole.
The implication is subtle but important. Perhaps the challenge is not organizational size itself, but whether people can continue to experience a meaningful social world within an organization that has become too large to understand through personal relationships alone.
The Paradox of Manufactured Connection
What I find particularly curious is how organizations respond when they begin to recognize this loss of connection.
We introduce team-building activities, networking events, employee communities, ambassador programs, and culture initiatives. We encourage cross-functional collaboration, organize informal gatherings, and invest in platforms designed to bring people closer together.
These efforts are often well intentioned and can create valuable opportunities for interaction. But they also reveal a paradox: we are increasingly trying to organize something that historically emerged as a natural consequence of sharing life and work.
Think about the colleagues with whom you have developed your strongest professional relationships. Chances are those relationships were not formed simply because you attended a networking event together. They probably emerged through a project that demanded your collective effort, a difficult situation you navigated together, or a series of everyday interactions through which familiarity gradually became trust.
You learned how the other person thinks, what matters to them, how they respond to uncertainty, and whether you can depend on them. Over time, the relationship acquired a depth that no formal introduction could have created.
This is not to say that organized opportunities for connection are useless. On the contrary, they can be the starting point for meaningful relationships. But an introduction is only the beginning. Relationships develop through what happens afterward, through continuity, reciprocity, and shared experience.
And perhaps this is where the comparison with villages becomes most revealing.
Traditional communities did not generally separate community-building from everyday life. People worked alongside one another, shared responsibilities, celebrated milestones, and faced challenges together. Their relationships developed because their lives intersected repeatedly and meaningfully.
Modern organizations, by contrast, can create an extraordinary amount of interaction without necessarily creating the same conditions for connection.
Employees move between projects, teams are assembled and dissolved, reporting lines change, and collaboration takes place across multiple digital platforms. People may attend meetings throughout the day, exchange countless messages, and work with dozens of colleagues without developing particularly deep relationships with any of them.
We have become remarkably efficient at connecting people for tasks, but perhaps less attentive to what allows those connections to become relationships.
The issue may not be that we communicate too little, but that we share too little of the experience through which trust and belonging develop.
Are We Designing Belonging Out of Organizations?
This brings me to what I believe is the most interesting implication for organizational leadership.
If relationships require time, familiarity, and shared experience, what happens when we design organizations around constant movement and change?
Consider how frequently teams are restructured, responsibilities redistributed, and employees reassigned to new projects. Such changes may be entirely justified by strategic priorities, evolving markets, or the need to improve performance. Organizations cannot remain static, and continuity should never become an excuse for avoiding necessary transformation.
Yet every structural change also affects a network of human relationships.
When a team is dissolved, it is not only a reporting structure that disappears. The organization also disrupts accumulated knowledge of how people work together, the informal agreements that make collaboration easier, and the trust developed through shared successes and difficulties. When a leader changes, employees may need time to understand a new person's expectations and judgment. When teams are repeatedly reconfigured, individuals must continually rebuild the familiarity that allows them to collaborate confidently.
These costs are rarely visible on an organizational chart.
We tend to evaluate change through financial, operational, and strategic considerations. Will the new structure improve efficiency? Will it clarify accountability? Will it accelerate decisions? But how often do we consider the relational consequences? What happens to the trust that has taken years to develop? How much collective knowledge disappears when established teams are separated? And how long does it take for new relationships to become sufficiently strong to support effective collaboration?
I wonder whether we have become so accustomed to treating organizations as systems of roles and responsibilities that we sometimes forget they are also networks of relationships. This does not mean that leaders should resist restructuring or prioritize familiarity above everything else. It means recognizing that relationships are not merely a pleasant byproduct of organizational life. They are part of what allows organizations to function.
And perhaps they deserve greater consideration in the decisions we make about how work is organized.
Rather than trying to manufacture belonging through additional initiatives, we might begin by examining whether our structures allow it to develop in the first place.
Do teams have enough continuity to build trust? Do people have opportunities to collaborate meaningfully beyond transactional exchanges? Can employees find a recognizable community within the larger organization? Are we creating environments in which relationships have time to deepen, or are we continually resetting them in the pursuit of efficiency?
These questions do not offer a simple formula for organizational design. But they shift the focus from belonging as something to be delivered through programs to belonging as something that emerges from the way people experience work.
And that distinction matters.
Growing Without Losing What Makes Us Human
For decades, much of management thinking has focused on how to scale organizations more effectively. We have developed increasingly sophisticated approaches to coordinating resources, standardizing processes, sharing information, and measuring performance. Technology has expanded these capabilities enormously, and artificial intelligence will undoubtedly transform them further. Yet the more capable we become at scaling systems, the more important it may be to understand what does not scale in quite the same way.
Human relationships still require attention. Trust still develops through experience. Belonging still depends, at least in part, on feeling known, recognized, and connected to others. Perhaps the future of organizational design lies not in choosing between human relationships and formal structures, but in understanding how they can complement one another.
Large organizations need systems to function effectively, but they also need smaller communities in which people can develop the familiarity and trust that make those systems work in practice. They need the efficiency that comes from coordination, without losing the human connection that gives collaboration meaning.
This may require us to think differently about leadership. Rather than treating culture as something that can be defined centrally and transmitted throughout the organization, perhaps leaders should pay closer attention to the conditions in which culture is actually experienced. The everyday interactions between colleagues. The continuity of teams. The shared challenges that bring people together. The opportunities to contribute, to be recognized, and to feel part of something larger without becoming anonymous within it.
None of this suggests that we should recreate traditional villages inside modern corporations. Nor does it mean that smaller is always better, or that every employee needs close personal relationships with everyone they work with. The lesson I take from Dunbar's research is less about a specific number than about a fundamental tension in organizational life.
We have learned how to scale the structures through which people work together. But we cannot assume that the relationships that make those structures meaningful will scale automatically.
And perhaps that is the real challenge facing organizations today.
We can build companies that span continents, connect thousands of employees, and coordinate extraordinary levels of complexity. But within those vast structures, people still seek something remarkably simple: to be known, to be trusted, and to feel that they belong.
We have built companies bigger than villages. That is an extraordinary achievement. The question is whether, in learning how to make organizations bigger, we have paid enough attention to what makes them human.